Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence offers workshops

Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence offers workshops

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence will present:

-- Teaching and Learning with Visuals from 11:15 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Thursday, March 27, in Room 201 Chambers Building.

Faculty in many disciplines use visual representations to organize their knowledge, but their students often struggle to do so. Join Institute consultants Crystal Ramsay, research associate and instructional consultant, and Larkin Hood, research associate and instructional consultant, to discuss ways faculty can help their students learn using visuals.

Are you like many faculty who struggle with classroom discussions? Does it feel like you’re pulling teeth? Are you assigning a reading, spending time developing exciting -- to you -- questions and presenting these questions to the class, only be confronted by a sea of blank stares? In this four-part workshop series we’ll practice a revolutionary discussion model that does something truly different. It actually puts the responsibility of both content and academic discussion into the hands of the learner. Of course, it also requires a bit of courage, but the payoff is worth it.

Student Centered Discussion (SCD) is a process for training students to have productive, generative discussions about the course content. In this workshop Cindy Decker Raynak, senior instructional designer and consultant, will address how to create a climate conducive to student centered discussion, promote the skills required for effective discussion (e.g. communication, interpersonal competence and critical thinking), and provide students with a workable process for structuring discussion and tools that maximize the efficacy of discussions.